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Aug 23, 2012

"It wasn't a fit"

How many coaches has your skater had in the last 5 years? If it's more than about 3, and the changes weren't forced by external circumstances (somebody moved, or quit for instance), then you might be a coach hopper.

Here are some of the excuses reasons people give for coach hopping.

Not really a serious skater
A lot of kids start private lessons for help passing a level, or nailing a specific element. Then, when they have that element, they quit the lessons. Next time they need specific help, they get amnesia, completely forgetting the coach they worked with before. Coaches hate this. At least let the former coach know that you're going to work with someone else. Then when the inevitable "I thought Suzy was your kid?" question comes along, they're not caught blindsides.

"It wasn't a fit"
This is the number one reason given by coaches and parents when they can't give the real reason. The translation is (if coach says it), "that mother is a nightmare." If the parent says it "we realized that coach was not the fashionable one." Seriously, though, sometimes it really isn't a fit for numerous reasons-- schedule (see below), personality, cost, differing expectations. Of course, if it's one of these, just say so. Otherwise people will assume one of the first reasons. (Better yet, if asked, just say "we decided to make a change." If pressed, continue to say this, for which the translation is "it's none of your business.")

UPDATE: There are a lot of replies in the comments suggesting that ALL reasons fit under this excuse, including gross unprofessionalism including habitual tardiness, inappropriate attitude ("being mean"), emotional abuse ("you're stupid, you're fat), and financial shenanigans (short lessons, full price). Folks, when coaches act like this it is everyone's business. There is absolutely no reason to hide behind social lies when there is a legitimate consumer reason for the split. If you were habitually overcharged at a store, or yelled at by the clerks, would you tell people you don't go there because "it wasn't a fit?"

Schedule
This is a tough one. In a market like mine, schedule is a non-reason. There is so much ice that you will be able to find the time. Plus, I've often had parents tell me the schedule won't work, just to see them with the new coach on the exact ice I offered. In smaller markets, schedule (which includes necessary travel time) does sometimes necessitate a change in coaches. However, you cannot blame the schedule if your idea of scheduling is "we can have a lesson during this single 30-minute window and are not flexible on this." If that is the case, you're not looking for a coach, you're looking for a babysitter.

For competitive students, all other things being equal, it makes no sense to change a coach who has been successful with your skater (as measured not by wins, but by accomplishment, skill increase, and personal best scores). If you're skater's doing well, but you switch anyway, then you're a "it wasn't a fit" parent.

Cost
Number one reason people drop in and out. See "not a serious skater" about which coach to go back to.

Competitive skaters
If you're making your ambitious skater switch coaches every 6 months or more, you are destroying your skater's career. For one thing, strong competitive coaching relationships take years to build. For another, different coaches have different, usually equally acceptable techniques and practice protocols. You will lose a season every time you switch. Further, if you're showing up at the non-quals in late summer with Coach Success, then turning up at Regionals with Coach Whosit, but then at Nationals with Coach Fashionable, the judges are just going to roll their eyes and move on, unless you're really blowing them out of the water. Which if you switch coaches like this, you won't.

Finally, to zero in on the serious side of this issue:

Abuse
If this is your reason for switching coaches, for god's sake tell the skating director, or if you don't trust the skating director, then tell your doctor, and be prepared to back it up with documentation (names, dates, places). Involve the skater in this decision. Abuse includes inappropriate touching, questionable language, insistence on excessive dieting, and emotional abuse.

The downside of constantly switching coaches is that people stop taking the skater seriously. One of the most common sights at the rink is the talented 17 or 18 year old who has never made it out of the preliminary rounds at Regionals but has decided to put off college to give it one more shot, with her 8th coach. We all shake our heads and blame the parents.

I'm not saying never switch coaches. My daughter had 4 coaches in her 11 years of semi-competitive skating. Her first coach moved to Florida. Her second coach quit to run her family's business. She developed a serious personal dislike for the third one, for reasons which did not become clear until years later. She still works with her last coach (going on 10 years).

24 comments:

Coach #1 I left after an extended injury that had me off the ice for 4 months. I had issues with the way he presented technique and the pace he wanted to teach things (I thought it was too accelerated, I wanted to focus on basics) so the injury just made it easier to leave. When I was ready to go back on the ice, my spot was taken.

Coach #2 I was very happy with. Again, I had an injury, this time off the ice for almost 9 months. When I came back, she was still doing LTS, but didn't want to take on privates anymore. She actually stopped coaching at all about a month after I returned.

Coach #3 I am very happy with, but he will graduate in May. I am anticipating that he will move, so that means I'll be on the search for Coach #4...

I have a question about this. My skater is doing very well with current coach and has made wonderful progress and showing very strong technique(or so I've been told). She also admires a very pretty young fun hip coach who does very fashionable fresh routines and has said more than once "I wish she was my coach" I do not want my skater switching coaches. I know she really loves her coach, she just admires young pretty coach. What would you do?

There's no rule that says you can't have a coach and then a choreographer. :)

Some coaches actually encourage a private lesson or two with another coach just to see if they know any other techniques for getting you through x element. Though most times I think it's because there's a special visiting coach and they want you to work with them because it's a specialization coach). :)

It is a monumental decision to decide if you keep a coach or end the relationship. I can't see doing it flippantly. What happens when a parent (maybe not even both) want a coaching relationship to end and the student wants to continue? ~Meg

I still say 'it wasn't a fit'. That doesn't mean Coach A wasn't fashionable. It means Coach A regularly provided 7-8 minute lessons and billed for 10-15 and denied it when I called her on it and finally started tracking (it wasn't occasionally or it wouldn't have mattered - it was a consistent pattern). It means Coach A appeared to not like my daughter, who told me a year after she left her that Coach A had told her that she must need glasses since she obviously couldn't see what she was showing her to do (this was an 8 year-old non-competitive child at the time). It means that with every fibre of her being, Coach A appears to hate her job. I suppose I could have said those things, but I didn't want to gossip and badmouth Coach A at the rink.

So we went with Coach B that bundle asked for. We've been with her a year and my daughter adores her. She got serious this year and now has Coach C for dance/stroking. Adores them both. We're not going anywhere for the forseeable future.

As an aside, Coach A attracts kids out of CanSkate and seems to always lose them in StarSkate. I strongly suspect it's for the reasons I outlined above. Even when you try not to gossip, you hear rumblings.

But my question is, if the coach was abusive emotionally and financially why wouldn't you say so? Why let the next family suffer under this kind of unprofessionalism as well? Who are you protecting? Why would you not report this behavior to the skating director? Why not let other parents know about this?

I'd say that "it wasn't a fit" and "we decided to make a change" both mean "yes, there is a reason, but it's none of your business." Could be a change to 'coach fashionable' but could just as easily mean 'coach was mean' or 'coach was late a lot' or even 'coach got fed up with my spoiled whiny kid and dropped us'...

"Coach got fed up with my spoiled child" is a good use of "it wasn't a fit." But again, it just stumps me why you wouldn't tell people that the coach is always late, or mean. Why do people protect coaches like this? (serious question)

My feelings on this would just be the awkward tension it might create in such a closed intimate community. You have to see that coach daily and sit next to the parents who still use said coach. I don't know about anyone else but speaking negatively about a coworker for example(even if it is true) still makes me feel icky. I would also think it would open the air to create a he said/she said- oh really I was late all the time and cut lessons short? Well skater refused to listen to anything I said and insisted they do things how Mummy Dearest told her! etc.

Short answer: politeness and politics in a closed community. Our rink had a coach who was routinely late and borderline abusive. She was also a long-time close personal friend of the skating director, who was known to protect her. How many people do you think spoke up honestly about her, given that?

Some of the problems (like the comment about needing glasses) I wasn't aware of. My daughter told me a year later how mean the coach had been. I was always there but couldn't hear what she was saying from the stands. Seriously, if I'd known she said that to my kid (to any kid), I'd have ripped her a new one right then and there. A year later, there didn't seem to be much point; I told my daughter that she should always share that kind of information with me because no one should treat someone else that way and isn't it a great thing how wonderful Coach B and C are?

The other reason is why I posted this comment anonymously when I usually don't. Because the Skating Director already knows and doesn't want to hear it. Coach A is a wonderful coach, etc. If you get branded as a 'problem parent' by SD, it had negative ramifications for your child.

Since I left Coach A, I've had at LEAST ten parents I know fairly well ask me how I did it. Like anything umpleasant, do it quick and get it done. (A bit like waxing your legs for those who do that. Once it's spread you're committed. Hesitancy just hurts more. Grab and yank). Firing that coach was the best thing I've ever done for my daughter's skating. She went from CanSkate 5 to landing all of her single jumps (although her axel is under-rotated and definitely not consistent) in one year.

This topic deeply resonates with me on several levels. As a former competitive skater who was fortunate enough to be with the my main coach from the very first day of Pre-Alpha skating school through my Senior Test, my mother and I were pretty resistant to the "flavor of the month" syndrome so many of my peers adopted when it came to switching coaches. My main coach was a great match and while we had our moments, the overall connection was wonderful. The more important thing is that my coach acted as a director - and truly worked to ensure that my development as a skater and a person was the primary focus. As a result, she had no problem referring me to other specialists or setting up lessons with other coaches herself to ensure that I was able to learn different techniques or schools of thought. I think this openness allowed me to be exposed to techniques and people she approved of, in a manner that was regulated and guided, while protecting me from other coaches who might try to solicit my parents for lessons. On the flip side, I did fire a choreographer for being generally rude and condescending to me, and another coach who taught me Moves in the Field lessons for overcharging for lessons (ie, he'd give me a 15 minute lesson and charge for 20 or 30). In both situations, we were upfront with the coach about why we left, without badmouthing that coach or their reputation at the rink.

I have since transitioned from competitive skating to coaching and have had professional interactions with both of these coaches many years later. It's amazing to see how time has changed this dynamic - probably because my family never tampered with their reputations. We just quietly left after we discussed our decision with the coach iin question. Since I've been coaching, I have had two low level students "leave me" due to solicitation from another more senior coach. It seems to me that the bad fit situation/discussion comes later on down the line after a longer relationship, and less frequently from the new skater family who simply doesn't understand how solicitation/coach changing etiquette works. Thoughts?

I've had 3 coaches in 4 years, but that wasn't really my fault. The first coach quit, the second coach went on maternity leave and asked me to get a new coach, and I'm currently still with my third coach.

I've had 4 primary coaches in 9 years as a skater. One is current, two I left because I moved, and the other one left to join an ice show and we didn't reconnect when she eventually returned because I'd found another coach at a different rink.

I think if people took more care in initially choosing a coach there would be less "coach-hopping".

We've had bad luck with coaches, mostly because the coaches said one thing (to get us to hire them) and did another.

When we interviewed the coaches before hiring them, we were very clear what we were looking for--how many lessons a week we could afford, what our daughter's current goals were and what other activities our daughter was involved in. We talked about our daughter's learning style. We also made it clear that skating was a privilege, and if our daughter was not enjoying skating or was not making an effort, we needed to know this so we could reevaluate the situation. We told them that for us, it's a struggle to pay for skating and we were happy to continue to pay for as much skating as we could afford because our daughter loved skating so much.

We also asked about their policies and their coaching styles. We asked both current and former parents about the coach. Unfortunately, former parents were hesitant to say anything negative...until after we hired the coach, then they gave us a laundry list of what to watch out for.

It has been our experience that most of these coaches told us what we wanted to hear, not the truth. Most never delivered on their promises and cancelled lessons often. Even though we told them up front what we were looking for, I think they believed they could convince us, with time, that what they were offering was really what she needed. They expected more lessons than we could afford, the expectation that daughter would give up other activities for skating and that synchro was the answer to keeping our daughter skating. It was very frustrating!

One coach we left was not very serious about coaching (it was a social activity for her) and she had some serious daycare and family issues which interfered with her coaching. Two other coaches were synchro coaches and it became clear that their real intention was to groom our daughter for synchro. In addition they were both overextended in their responsibilities at the rink...synchro, skating school, bridge programs and ice show...and had too many private students to accomodate (one even had a full-time job in addition to her rink obligations). When push came to shove, synchro was always their priority.

^This makes me feel so grateful for our situation. My daughters coach(shes only had one) was her LTS instructor and is just wonderful! She has taken great interest in my daughter, inspires her and you can tell she is really invested in my daughter has a whole person. *counting my blessings*

I have only had to break up from one coach I needed to leave (bec I was switching rinks). The rest of the time....once I decide to leave, something happens so they break up with me. Rinks close, a coach decides to be a judge, another moves across country, another goes to a local rink outside my commute zone, or something else that allows us gracefully to part.I don't want to call it 'luck' because it's sometimes sad for the coach, but it means I never have to have 'the conversation'.

Okay so I had a coach for about 10 years who I didn't exactly like and didn't push me to my full potential and really overall didn't help me progress. I know that I should have dropped her but she was friends with my mom and I didn't have the heart to end the relationship. So here's my question... I just took 4 years off to go to college and I want to start skating again. Its ok for me to start with a new coach? Do i have to explain to my old coach that I don't want to take from her anymore? It has been 4 years since I last had a lesson with her... thanks!

About Me

Who is Xan?

I'm an adult figure skater who got the "bug" in my forties and went through several years of coaches' education so I could follow this passion. I earned a Senior Rating in Group Instruction through the Professional Skaters Association (currently in abeyance due to PSA rules) and have passed US Figure Skating and Ice Skating Institute tests on the Adult track in Freestyle, Ice Dance, and Moves in the Field, plus School Figures on the standard track. My daughter is a high-test skater who has competed nationally and skated professionally with an ice show, so I've seen the sport from many perspectives.

This figure skating blog is to help parents of figure skaters learn what goes on, especially in group skating classes, and I hope to answer questions about how to help your child have the best experience learning to skate that they can.

I'd love to take credit for "Xanboni" but it was actually invented by a 4-year old in class, who asked me, upon learning my name, if that meant that I "owned the xanboni truck that fixes the ice." :)